Some conservation practices and examples of balanced resource management corresponded to historical periods when there was low population density, less mobility, and above all when there wasn’t the population pressure that exists nowadays.
We are justified in our criticism of the fortress policy in relation to parks. But, in fairness, we have to accept that this policy has preserved spaces in which wildlife might still be found.
Myth 3—Purity
We nurture the illusion that communities are above suspicion of robbery or corruption. Sadly this is not the case; the community is part of this system, and where there is money, there is temptation and bribery. Only last year, I took part in a debate within one of these communities, in which its members denounced a string of abuses perpetrated by their leaders, involving the undue appropriation of funds to acquire luxury goods. I won’t mention the name of this community but I can assure you that it is widely held up as an example of the apparent success of the policy of community involvement.
Myth 4—Poverty and the Success of Community Policies
There is no doubt that the uprooting of communities to create spaces for wildlife was a historical injustice that did irreparable damage. But one also has to admit that the poverty of these communities is not greatly different from that of other rural communities, which were never expelled from their original areas.
We must look at the acclaimed success of community projects with a critical eye. Many which served as flag-bearers are today experiments that have failed.
Myth 5—The State’s Abdication from Responsibility
The discourse about communities coincides with external neo-liberal pressure to reduce the role and responsibility of the State. If we do not wish local communities to adopt a predatory attitude towards resources, we must prioritize investment in the adjoining areas, which are the parks. The State, if it wants returns, must give priority to infrastructures, roads and services. Until now, we have assumed that this task must fall exclusively to the individual investor in such regions. But no investor can promote the whole range of activities, cover general shortages, correct regional imbalances and fulfill the role of the government.
The State cannot delude itself into thinking it can hand the initiative over to private investors and pass supervision of this over to the NGOs. The State should not be asked to do less, but it should be asked to do other things, such as taking the initiative, planning, regulating, supervising, controlling.
Myth 6—The Marginalization
of Local Government Authorities
If the State at the level of the central government is on a diet, at the district level, it is training for total abolition. In the districts, as if by some stroke of wizardry that I have never understood, there is practically no government authority. What there is, are NGOs, local communities, and traditional leaders.
It should be the reverse. We shall, in fact, only have strong communities if there is consolidated local government, technically prepared to face issues of conservation and development. The local administration of a district or an area next to a park should know how the process of integrated management of its wildlife actually works. What is more, it should have such management as its principal aim.
Myth 7—Between Paternalism and the Feeling of Guilt
The communities adjoining parks should, of course, be involved, but we need to ask ourselves how and on what basis. Allow me to ask a mischievous question: in the management of an airport, how would you involve the neighbouring communities, would you turn them into profit-sharers or co-administrators? Of course not. An airport is an area with technically sophisticated specialist needs. Well let me tell you that the management of ecotourism or the use of resources for tourism is an equally specific area with highly sophisticated technical requirements.
And then of course we need to study rigorously (and above all without any demagogic agenda) the experiences of others. I have seen studies made by Europeans that maintain that the invasion of parks by communities is legitimate because it is a question of historic vengeance for their exclusion during colonial and post-colonial times. Is this really the case? Or will it always be like this? Were the war veterans in Zimbabwe, who attacked the parks, really the neighbouring communities? One thing seems true: we cannot stand here with arms folded, and escape our obligation to protect a national patrimony merely out of guilt.
In all these cases, when we talk of communities, we invent an entity that doesn’t exist. If we want current communities to be effective partners in our politics of development, with greater equity and efficiency, we shall have to create them. We cannot wait for these communities to reveal themselves spontaneously. We need a government program that will enable these communities to constitute themselves. Otherwise, with the paternalism that drives us currently, we will eventually offer these rural populations a poisoned chalice.
Final Conclusion
My friends, it is not merely a question of reconciling tourism and conservation. It is a question of reconciling agriculture, forestry, livestock farming, and all forms of governance with the changing reality of Mozambique and of the World. It is certainly a question of reconciling all aspects of the State’s intervention with the reality of rural Mozambique.
The difficulties we have in wildlife conservation are not very different from those experienced in the fields of agriculture, or of mineral extraction, or in other areas of development. We still have difficulties of a cultural nature. The question of conservation (or rather, of the sustainable management of natural resources), will only become a political reality after it has become a cultural reality. Let me ask you this: how many of our leaders have visited or had any contact with a park or reserve inside or outside Mozambique? These experiences need to be lived. Only after contact with wildlife, and only after ecotourism has become a fact of culture, will these matters cease to be a secondary concern in our manner of governance.
We are the inheritors of Noah’s Ark. But we are an impoverished Noah, at risk of extinction both as sovereign nations and as people exercising their citizenship. Some want us to act as saviours of our natural patrimony. Others want us to build a new Ark, an improved Ark, with luxury cabins for a wealthy minority. It isn’t an Ark we need. What we need is another world, a world that doesn’t live under threat of a final deluge.
Lecture on the conservation of fauna in Mozambique,
as part of a debate promoted by the Terra Viva Centre,
Maputo, June, 2004.
Waters of My Beginning
A city isn’t a place. It is the frame of a life. A frame in search of a portrait, that’s what I see when I revisit my place of birth. It’s not streets, or houses. What I see again is a time, what I hear is the speech of that time. A dialect called memory, in a nation called childhood.
In spite of everything, a map puts us at ease: there is the city, the second biggest in Mozambique. That’s where concrete, iron, asphalt, the usual vestments of an urban space, were instated. But all this wasn’t enough to dismantle the illusion: what dwells in the place of my childhood is the untameable, that which will forever remain ungovernable.
I speak of my Beira, the little city where I was born, located in the centre of Mozambique, on the left bank of the River Pungué. Beira is a place that was stolen from the waters of an estuary, lined with mud and mangroves. A liquid city, on a ground that flows. So much so that when speaking of it, I call it my native water.